The Pursuit of Material Success and Mental Health

We must not miss this point, as material success stories of corporations, multinationals, political parties, religious establishments, societies, and families upsurge, numbers of people with mental illnesses too will explode.

The theme for this year’s Mental Health Day (October 10) is “prioritising mental health in the workplace”. Give success to the work of our hands is an ancient prayer of a Hebrew Psalmist. Nearly 3,500 years have passed, we have seen empires rise and fall; civilisations appear and disappear; social, scientific, and technological revolutions have ripped through the world; still this meta human wish hasn’t changed. Every person getting a chance to stroke the magic lamp wishes for the mysterious, enchanted endpoint called success, which in fact is an ever-growing ladder. Despondently, often the measure of success, especially in capitalist economies, is limited to one’s material accumulations. Off the topic, John Henry Jowett, a hundred years ago, had opined that the real measure of success is how much we’d be worth if we lost all our money.

In no case the phrase, end justifies the means, is more suited than in the case of success. Do what you want but succeed is the call. For a successful empire slavery, war, and colonisation looked fine; for successful MNCs and Corporations toxic working conditions, achieving targets and productivity pressure, and long and untimely working hours look fine; for successful political parties being authoritarian, racist, majoritarian, discriminative, and being right- wing populist look fine; for successful religious establishments spreading fear and guilt, promoting irrational absurd ideas, exclusive truth and salvation claims, and intolerance look fine; for successful families and society traditional gender roles, pressure to conform, endorsing caste and class differences, and high expectations to perform look fine. Now is the question, at what cost and at whose expense are these great successes strategised?

Yes, mental illnesses, if not entirely, majorly are the byproduct of sociologically dysfunction- al, discriminative, and arbitrary institutions, societies, and families. Forced labor, forced marriage, debt bondage, human trafficking, child labor, domestic servitude and violence, etc. of course build mental imbalance. But we must not miss this point, as material success stories of political parties, corporations, religious establishments, societies, and families upsurge, numbers of people with mental illnesses too will explode; and worse still it will be made to seem normal. Available statistics say that one in every eight adults suffers from one or multiple mental illnesses—that is 970 million in world have a mental disorder, one in seven 10–19-year-olds experience a mental disorder; anxiety, depression, and behavioural disorders being the most common ones. Most of these are people whom businesses, institutions, and establishments have used and abused as they climbed their ladders of material success.

People speak about long working hours, intellectually and creatively demanding jobs and studies creating stress and other mental disturbances. I would look at it with a Marxian lens. There are many whom I know work long hours and in extremely arduous professions; being a parent to being an artist to being an entrepreneur; their work has no time limit, and it often extends 12–18 hours a day, yet they enjoy good mental health. The clarity perhaps lies in the Marxian concept of alienation—characterised as alienated labour. Alienation refers to forced and involuntary labour in which the worker finds no purpose, no pleasure or contentment, no needs fulfilment, no independence or power, no mental growth or physical development. A woman labouring without the joy of having a child would be stressful and traumatic. Alienation is a result of the social structure of aggressive capitalism, where the means of production and profit are held and controlled by a few. The masses become means to their profit and success. Their cruel pursuit of profit and success become the reason for the critical mental health condition of the masses.

As our economic and developmental aspirations rise, mental wellbeing is often overlooked. It is time that we have a fundamental shift in how we define success and happiness, have a more sustainable work culture. If you are feeling anxious or worried, feeling depressed or unhappy, has emotional outbursts, facing sleep problems, has weight or appetite changes, become quiet and withdrawn, got into substance abuse, feeling guilty and worthless, or has random changes in behaviour and feelings; or you see them with your family members or friends, it is time to act, the psychological immune system has collapsed—seek help, provide help. Asking for help is refusing to give up, providing help is refusing to let go.

Written as editorial for Together magazine.

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